The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead
Sheriff Ricky Dicky Doo-Dah Grimes
Format	Way too long
Created by	Robert Kirkman Frank Darabont
Theme music composer	Bear Grylls
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English
Production
Producer(s)	AMC
Distributor	AMC+
Broadcast
Picture format	Dead

“Coral stop eating pudding! The walkers are about to walk all over us!”

~ Rick Grimes on Carl eating pudding instead of staying inside the fucking house

The Walking Dead is an American romantic-comedy, action-adventure, thriller-horror, drama-cooking television series that ran for eleven seasons between 2010 and 2022. The show is based on a 2003 comic book of the same name created by a couple of fat slobs obsessed with the film Dawn of the Dead. AMC, which had not read the source material, picked up the show after the colossal failure of the predecessor, Breaking Bad, hoping that The Walking Dead could boost TV ratings for the studio — which, like the walkers in the show, were dead. The show quickly received a large audience, but didn't catch on with those of smaller stature.

Series overview

Season	Episodes	First aired	Last aired
1	6	October 31, 2010	December 5, 2010
Torn Apart	6	October 3, 2011	October 3, 2011
2	13	October 16, 2011	March 18, 2012
Cold Storage	4	October 1, 2012	October 1, 2012
3	16	October 14, 2012	March 31, 2013
The Oath	3	October 1, 2013	October 1, 2013
4	16	October 13, 2013	March 30, 2014
5	16	October 12, 2014	March 29, 2015
6	16	October 11, 2015	April 3, 2016
7	16	October 23, 2016	April 2, 2017
Red Machete	6	October 22, 2017	April 9, 2018
8	16	October 22, 2017	April 15, 2018
9	16	October 7, 2018	March 31, 2019
10	22	October 6, 2019	April 4, 2021
11	24	August 22, 2021	November 20, 2022

Carl with the pudding that ended up getting him killed.

Cast and characters

Main article: List of The Walking Dead characters

• Andrew "Abe" Linkedin as Rick Grimes: a small town sheriff who has a knack for being either the most badass motherfucker, or a crying baby.
• Harvey Morman Greedus as Daryl Dixon: a crossbow biker — but not at the same time, as then he would just fall off.
• Stephen Ying as Glenn Wee: his cap makes him invincible — as well as the riot gear he gets in season three.
• Chandelier Briggs as Carl Grimes: Rick's small son — becomes a pirate who likes to eat chocolate pudding and spaghetti (together).
• John Bernstein as Frank Shane Walsh Castle: a cop and Rick's former best friend. Punished Santa Claus for not going bald.
• Melissa McGroom as Carol Pfizer: an abused housewife that ends up killing every child she meets with Covid.
• Lauran Conan as Maggie Green Wee: a hot farmer's daughter and host of the talk show Late Night with the Talking Dead.
• Jiffy Jean Jorgon as Negan Baseball: what can I say? The guy really loves baseball. And swearing.

Production

Origins

One Thursday afternoon, at approximately 4:30pm, Robert Kirkman was watching his favourite gardening programme of all time, Dawn of the Shed. Crying over his inability to plant even the most basic of crops, he had an epiphany to instead focus his energies on creating his own "original" zombie story — having previously enjoyed seeing a screenshot of Resident Evil in 1998. The next day, he used Microsoft Paint to quickly hash out The Walking Dead, and placed it on the shelves of every comic book store across the country. After failing to sell a single copy of his horrendous graphic novel, Kirkman decided to make a TV show out it. Kirkman then traveled to AMC Network Headquarters in New York City, and used his knowledge of fruity sounding alcoholic concoctions to deliver such delicacies as "Hand Shandies" and "Five Finger Cocktails" to the company executives. This was enough to convince them that Kirkman was not of sound mind, but they saw the potential for cashing in on his idea and immediately set about locking him in one of their "Milking Chambers".

A very accurate pie chart representing the content of The Walking Dead.

Setting

Taking place in the State of Georgia, The Walking Dead follows a rag tag group of people as they struggle to cope with the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. What sets the show apart is the special way in which the zombie virus works. It infects people in such a way that the surviving groups always end up being Politically Correct in their makeup. For instance, the Atlanta outbreak of the virus ensured that the only survivors contained at least one African-American, one Asian, one disabled person, one redneck, one blonde Caucasian female, one child, and one member of Glee. Some viewers think this may be a central plot point, and that the outbreak of the virus was in fact perpetrated by a lone member of Multiculturists Anonymous.

Zombies

The show takes place in an alternate universe to ours (much like everyother show and movie). That is to say, one in which filmmaker George A. Romero was never born. This is indicated by the fact that no character is familiar with the word "zombie", thus each group of survivors must invent a new descriptive word (i.e. walkers, biters, day players). In genre tradition, the zombies are rotting corpses whose heads crumble under a good punch, yet they have the biting power of a steroidal jungle cat. Death by zombie attack comes in one of two ways. Either a person succumbs under a horde and is ripped to shreds (thus making it impossible to return from the dead) or they receive a small bite which they hide until their group finds out and puts a bullet in their head (thus making it impossible to return from the dead). This leaves one wondering: just where the hell all the zombies are coming from?

Carl Grimes

In the comics, Carl Grimes survives to the very end. However, for the TV show, his father Rick who is an all American cowboy cop, was played by British actor Andrew Lincoin. For nine seasons, Lincoin faked an American accent which caused his words to not come out correctly at times. Most notably, the one word Lincoin had trouble saying the most in his Rick voice was "Carl" — his characters son, which one would think a father would be able to say since he did name him after all. Throughout the series, everytime Rick would say 'Carl', it would come out either as "carr", "coral", "curl", "crawl", and many other iterations. Since Lincoin was not the only one who had trouble saying the name of Rick's son, the writers on the show decieded to just kill the character off entirely half-way through Season 8. This caused backlash from all the comic readers who had previously praised the show for killing off Glenn The Asian in Season 7, despite him being one of the best characters on the show, like how the comic depicted.

Franchise and spin-offs

Main article: The Walking Dead Universe

• Fear the Walking Dead — After three seasons of okay television, Morgan Jones from the main show takes over as the protagonist of Fear for five seasons of bad writing.
• World Beyond — Some kids go on a walk and somehow don't become walkers themselves. Rick carries the show, despite not even being in it and only being indirectly mentioned twice.
• Tales of the Walking Dead — Stealing the concept from Tales of the Jedi, Terry Crews joins The Walking Dead Cinematic Universe.
• Dead City — Maggie and Negan head to New York for some reason.
• Daryl Dixon — Daryl heads to France for some reason.
• The Ones Who Live — Michonne looks for Rick for some reason.

See also

• Zombie apocalypse